[caption id="attachment_161" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="A few inhabitants of the Zoo"]

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The scientists behind Galaxy Zoo 2 want to use your pattern recognition skills to help them classify galaxies. They call it 'citizen astronomy' and participants page through images of galaxies taken by an automated telescope, answering a series of questions about the appearance of a particular galaxy. The human eye is better than software at sorting these images into appropriate categories. Well over 100,000 people have participated and 50 million categorisations have been made (each galaxy is viewed by several people, making the classification much more reliable). Results so far have helped change thinking about the abundance of certain kinds of galaxies and have also resulted in the discovery of a very odd structure.